About EBV's

Our cattle are more than just their EBV's...

...they are the product of sensible and insightful breeding and selection practices that identify high performing animals early which means that the good EBV's will eventually follow. We only retain stock that are high performing under commercial conditions.

This is a major point of difference to the common seedstock practice of "breeding to get good EBV's". An animals EBV accuracy is only as good as the number of direct progeny that have been performance recorded and the great majority of animals will never have enough of those in their lifetime. At Talana, we assess the performance of the animal at every stage of their lifetime and use this information to make our performance assessments...the animals we retain are naturally the ones that will end up with the good EBV's, but we never set out to "breed good EBV's"...we are sometimes able to identify the high performers a decade earlier than BreedPlan.

There are no real shortcuts with genetic progress. Using young and "upcoming" international sires or young donors is a surefire way to stall genetic progress. But it does make for some interesting marketing talk and is used as a way to introduce some artificial value to a product.

At Talana, we much prefer to use proven genetics. Not proven in a show ring (that's just a beauty contest) nor with good performance data overseas, because that is not performance based on an Australian production system, but proven in real life under our conditions. We will let other studs bring in the fresh new genetics for trial (and mostly failure in one way or another) and we will sit behind and quietly identify the bloodlines that do work in our environment and for our markets and for our breeding stock.

So, when you see a Talana Limousin, you can feel assured that it is not the result of a relatively risky genetics gamble, but rather is backed by many generations of ancestry that "work" in our environment.